Father and Son

by Edmund Gosse

  In our circle, it was never for a moment admitted that Mr Paget was a lunatic. It was said that he had gravely sinned, and was under the Lord’s displeasure; prayers were abundantly offered up that he might be led back into the pathway of light, and that the Smiling Face might be drawn forth for him from behind the Frowning Providence. When the man had an epileptic seizure in the High Street, he was not taken to a hospital, but we repeated to one another, with shaken heads, that Satan, that crooked Serpent, had been unloosed for a season. Mr Paget was fond of talking, in private and in public, of his dreadful spiritual condition, and he would drop his voice while he spoke of having committed the Unpardonable Sin, with a sort of shuddering exultation, such as people sometimes feel in the possession of a very unusual disease.

  It might be thought that the position held in any community by persons so afflicted and eccentric as the Pagets would be very precarious. But it was not so with us; on the contrary, they took a prominent place at once. Mr Paget, in spite of his spiritual bankruptcy, was only too anxious to help my Father in his ministrations, and used to beg to be allowed to pray and exhort. In the latter case he took the tone of a wounded veteran, who, though fallen on the bloody field himself, could still encourage younger warriors to march forward to victory. Everybody longed to know what the exact nature had been of that sin against the Holy Ghost which had deprived Mr Paget of every glimmer of hope for time or for eternity. It was whispered that even my Father himself was not precisely acquainted with the character of it.

  This mysterious disability clothed Mr Paget for us with a kind of romance. We watched him as the women watched Dante in Verona whispering:

  Behold him, how Hell’s reek

  Has crisped his hair and singed his cheek!

  His person lacked, it is true, something of the dignity of Dante’s, for it was his caprice to walk up and down the High Street at noonday with one of those cascades of coloured paper which were known as ‘ornaments for your fireplace’ slung over the back and another over the front of his body. These he manufactured for sale, and he adopted the quaint practice of wearing the exuberant objects as a means for their advertisement.

  Mrs Paget had been accustomed to rule in the little ministry from which Mr Paget’s celebrated Sin had banished them, and she was inclined to clutch at the sceptre now. She was the only person I ever met with who was not afraid of the displeasure of my Father. She would fix her viper-coloured eyes on his, and say with a kind of gimlet firmness, ‘I hardly think that is the true interpretation, Brother G.,’ or, ‘But let us turn to Colossians, and see what the Holy Ghost says there upon this matter.’ She fascinated my Father, who was not accustomed to this kind of interruption, and as she was not to be softened by any flattery (such as:—‘Marvellous indeed, Sister, is your acquaintance with the means of grace!’) she became almost a terror to him.

  She abused her powers by taking great liberties, which culminated in her drawing his attention to the fact that my poor stepmother displayed ‘an overweening love of dress.’ The accusation was perfectly false; my stepmother was, if rather richly, always plainly dressed, in the sober Quaker mode; almost her only ornament was a large carnelian brooch, set in flowered flat gold. To this the envenomed Paget drew my Father’s attention as ‘likely to lead “the little ones of the flock” into temptation.’ My poor Father felt it his duty, thus directly admonished, to speak to my Mother. ‘Do you not think, my Love, that you should, as one who sets an example to others, discard the wearing of that gaudy brooch?’ ‘One must fasten one’s collar with something, I suppose?’ ‘Well, but how does Sister Paget fasten her collar?’ ‘Sister Paget,’ replied my Mother, stung at last into rejoinder, ‘fastens her collar with a pin,—and that is a thing which I would rather die than do!’

  Nor did I escape the attentions of this zealous reformer. Mrs Paget was good enough to take a great interest in me, and she was not satisfied with the way in which I was being brought up. Her presence seemed to pervade the village, and I could neither come in nor go out without seeing her hard bonnet and her pursed-up lips. She would hasten to report to my Father that she saw me laughing and talking ‘with a lot of unconverted boys,’ these being the companions with whom I had full permission to bathe and boat. She urged my Father to complete my holy vocation by some definite step, by which he would dedicate me completely to the Lord’s service. Further schooling she thought needless, and merely likely to foster intellectual pride. Mr Paget, she remarked, had troubled very little in his youth about worldly knowledge, and yet how blessed he had been in the conversion of souls until he had incurred the displeasure of the Holy Ghost!

  I do not know exactly what she wanted my Father to do with me; perhaps she did not know herself; she was meddlesome, ignorant and fanatical, and she liked to fancy that she was exercising influence. But the wonderful, the inexplicable thing is that my Father,—who, with all his limitations, was so distinguished and high-minded,—should listen to her for a moment, and still more wonderful is it that he really allowed her, grim vixen that she was, to disturb his plans and retard his purposes. I think the explanation lay in the perfectly logical position she took up. My Father found himself brought face to face at last, not with a disciple, but with a trained expert in his own peculiar scheme of religion. At every point she was armed with arguments the source of which he knew and the validity of which he recognised. He trembled before Mrs Paget as a man in a dream may tremble before a parody of his own central self, and he could not blame her without laying himself open somewhere to censure.

  But my stepmother’s instincts were more primitive and her actions less wire-drawn than my Father’s. She disliked Mrs Paget as much as one earnest believer can bring herself to dislike a sister in the Lord. My stepmother had quietly devoted herself to what she thought the best way of bringing me up, and she did not propose now to be thwarted by the wife of a lunatic Baptist. At this time I was a mixture of childishness and priggishness, of curious knowledge and dense ignorance. Certain portions of my intellect were growing with unwholesome activity, while others were stunted, or had never stirred at all. I was like a plant on which a pot has been placed, with the effect that the centre is crushed and arrested, while shoots are straggling up to the light on all sides. My Father himself was aware of this, and in a spasmodic way he wished to regulate my thoughts. But all he did was to try to straighten the shoots, without removing the pot which kept them resolutely down.

  It was my stepmother who decided that I was now old enough to go to boarding-school, and my Father, having discovered that an elderly couple of Plymouth Brethren kept an ‘academy for young gentlemen’ in a neighbouring seaport town,—in the prospectus of which the knowledge and love of the Lord were mentioned as occupying the attention of the headmaster and his assistants far more closely than any mere considerations of worldly tuition,—was persuaded to entrust me to its care. He stipulated, however, that I should always come home from Saturday night to Monday morning, not, as he said, that I might receive any carnal indulgence, but that there might be no cessation of my communion as a believer with the Saints in our village on Sundays. To this school, therefore, I presently departed, gawky and homesick, and the rift between my soul and that of my Father widened a little more.

  Chapter 12

  LITTLE BOYS FROM quiet, pious households, commonly found, in those days, a chasm yawning at the feet of their inexperience when they arrived at Boarding-school. But the fact that I still slept at home on Saturday and Sunday nights preserved me, I fancy, from many surprises. There was a crisis, but it was broad and slow for me. On the other hand, for my Father I am inclined to think that it was definite and sharp. Permission for me to desert the parental hearth, even for five days in certain weeks, was tantamount, in his mind, to admitting that the great scheme, so long caressed, so passionately fostered, must in its primitive bigness be now dropped.

  The Great Scheme (I cannot resist giving it the mortuary honour of capital letters) had been, as my readers know, that I sho
uld be exclusively and consecutively dedicated, through the whole of my life, to the manifest and uninterrupted and uncompromised ‘service of the Lord.’ That had been the aspiration of my Mother, and at her death she had bequeathed that desire to my Father, like a dream of the Promised Land. In their ecstasy, my parents had taken me, as Elkanah and Hannah had long ago taken Samuel, from their mountain-home of Ramathaim-Zophim down to sacrifice to the Lord of Hosts in Shiloh. They had girt me about with a linen ephod, and had hoped to leave me there; ‘as long as he liveth,’ they had said, ‘he shall be lent unto the Lord.’

  Doubtless in the course of these fourteen years it had occasionally flashed upon my Father, as he overheard some speech of mine, or detected some idiosyncrasy, that I was not one of those whose temperament points them out as ultimately fitted for an austere life of religion. What he hoped, however, was that when the little roughnesses of childhood were rubbed away, there would pass a deep mellowness over my soul. He had a touching way of condoning my faults of conduct, directly after reproving them, and he would softly deprecate my frailty, saying, in a tone of harrowing tenderness, ‘Are you not the child of many prayers?’ He continued to think that prayer, such passionate importunate prayer as his, must prevail. Faith could move mountains; should it not be able to mould the little ductile heart of a child, since he was sure that his own faith was unfaltering? He had yearned and waited for a son who should be totally without human audacities, who should be humble, pure, not troubled by worldly agitations, a son whose life should be cleansed and straightened from above, in custodiendo sermones Dei; in whom everything should be sacrificed except the one thing needful to salvation.

  How such a marvel of lowly piety was to earn a living had never, I think, occurred to him. My Father was singularly indifferent about money. Perhaps his notion was that, totally devoid of ambitions as I was to be, I should quietly become adult, and continue his ministrations among the poor of the Christian flock. He had some dim dream, I think, of there being just enough for us all without my having to take up any business or trade. I believe it was immediately after my first term at boarding-school, that I was a silent but indignant witness of a conversation between my Father and Mr Thomas Brightwen, my stepmother’s brother, who was a banker in one of the Eastern Counties.

  This question, ‘What is he to be?’ in a worldly sense, was being discussed, and I am sure that it was for the first time, at all events in my presence. Mr Brightwen, I fancy, had been worked upon by my stepmother, whose affection for me was always on the increase, to suggest, or faintly to stir the air in the neighbourhood of suggesting, a query about my future. He was childless and so was she, and I think a kind impulse led them to ‘feel the way,’ as it is called. I believe he said that the banking business, wisely and honourably conducted, sometimes led, as we know that it is apt to lead, to affluence. To my horror, my Father, with rising emphasis, replied that ‘if there were offered to his beloved child what is called “an opening” that would lead to an income of £10,000 a year, and that would divert his thoughts and interest from the Lord’s work, he would reject it on his child’s behalf.’ Mr Brightwen, a precise and polished gentleman, who evidently never made an exaggerated statement in his life, was, I think, faintly scandalised; he soon left us, and I do not recollect his paying us a second visit.

  For my silent part, I felt very much like Gehazi, and I would fain have followed after the banker if I had dared to do so, into the night. I would have excused to him the ardour of my Elisha, and I would have reminded him of the sons of the prophets—‘Give me, I pray thee,’ I would have said, ‘a talent of silver and two changes of garments.’ It seemed to me very hard that my Father should dispose of my possibilities of wealth in so summary a fashion, but the fact that I did resent it, and regretted what I supposed to be my ‘chance,’ shows how far apart we had already swung. My Father, I am convinced, thought that he gave words to my inward instincts when he repudiated the very mild and inconclusive benevolence of his brother-in-law. But he certainly did not do so. I was conscious of a sharp and instinctive disappointment at having had, as I fancied, wealth so near my grasp, and at seeing it all cast violently into the sea of my Father’s scruples.

  Not one of my village friends attended the boarding-school to which I was now attached, and I arrived there without an acquaintance. I should soon, however, have found a corner of my own if my Father had not unluckily stipulated that I was not to sleep in the dormitory with boys of my own age, but in the room occupied by the two elder sons of a prominent Plymouth Brother whom he knew. From a social point of view, this was an unfortunate arrangement, since these youths were some years older and many years riper than I; the eldest, in fact, was soon to leave; they had enjoyed their independence, and they now greatly resented being saddled with the presence of an unknown urchin. The supposition had been that they would protect and foster my religious practices; would encourage me, indeed, as my Father put it, to approach the Throne of Grace with them at morning and evening prayer. They made no pretence, however, to be considered godly; they looked upon me as an intruder; and after a while the younger, and ruder, of them openly let me know that they believed I had been put into their room to ‘spy upon’ them: it had been a plot, they knew, between their father and mine: and he darkly warned me that I should suffer if ‘anything got out.’ I had, however, no wish to trouble them, nor any faint interest in their affairs. I soon discovered that they were absorbed in a silly kind of amorous correspondence with the girls of a neighbouring academy, but ‘what were all such toys to me?’

  These young fellows, who ought long before to have left the school, did nothing overtly unkind to me, but they condemned me to silence. They ceased to address me except with an occasional command. By reason of my youth, I was in bed and asleep before my companions arrived upstairs, and in the morning I was always routed up and packed about my business while they still were drowsing. But the fact that I had been cut off from my coevals by night, cut me off from them also by day—so that I was nothing to them, neither a boarder nor a day-scholar, neither flesh, fish nor fowl. The loneliness of my life was extreme, and that I always went home on Saturday afternoon and returned on Monday morning still further checked my companionships at school. For a long time, round the outskirts of that busy throng of opening lives, I ‘wandered lonely as a cloud,’ and sometimes I was more unhappy than I had ever been before. No one, however, bullied me, and though I was dimly and indefinably witness to acts of uncleanness and cruelty, I was the victim of no such acts and the recipient of no dangerous confidences. I suppose that my queer reputation for sanctity, half dreadful, half ridiculous, surrounded me with a non-conducting atmosphere.

  We are the victims of hallowed proverbs, and one of the most classic of these tells us that ‘the child is father of the man.’ But in my case, I cannot think that this was true. In mature years I have always been gregarious, a lover of my kind, dependent upon the company of friends for the very pulse of moral life. To be marooned, to be shut up in a solitary cell, to inhabit a lighthouse, or to camp alone in a forest, these have always seemed to me afflictions too heavy to be borne, even in imagination. A state in which conversation exists not, is for me an air too empty of oxygen for my lungs to breathe it.

  Yet when I look back upon my days at boarding-school, I see myself unattracted by any of the human beings around me. My grown-up years are made luminous to me in memory by the ardent faces of my friends, but I can scarce recall so much as the names of more than two or three of my schoolfellows. There is not one of them whose mind or whose character made any lasting impression upon me. In later life, I have been impatient of solitude, and afraid of it: at school, I asked for no more than to slip out of the hurly-burly and be alone with my reflections and my fancies. That magnetism of humanity which has been the agony of mature years, of this I had not a trace when I was a boy. Or those fragile loves to which most men look back with tenderness and passion, emotions to be explained only as Montaigne explained them, ‘
parceque c’était lui, parceque c’était moi,’ I knew nothing. I, to whom friendship has since been like sunlight and like sleep, left school unbrightened and unrefreshed by commerce with a single friend.

  If I had been clever, I should doubtless have attracted the jealousy of my fellows, but I was spared this by the mediocrity of my success in the classes. One little fact I may mention, because it exemplifies the advance in observation which has been made in forty years. I was extremely nearsighted, and in consequence was placed at a gross disadvantage, by being unable to see the slate or the black-board on which our tasks were explained. It seems almost incredible when one reflects upon it, but during the whole of my school life, this fact was never commented upon or taken into account by a single person, until the Polish lady who taught us the elements of German and French drew some one’s attention to it in my sixteenth year. I was not quick, but I passed for being denser than I was because of the myopic haze that enveloped me. But this is not an autobiography, and with the cold and shrouded details of my uninteresting school life I will not fatigue the reader.